“Patching up Virtue”

Herdt's Putting On Virtue has two chief aims. The first is to champion the virtue tradition against Christian moral quietism and modern deontological ethics. The second is to facilitate reconciliation between Augustinian and Emersonian virtue. To accomplish these tasks Herdt constructs a counter‐narrative to Schneewind's Invention of Autonomy, in which Luther's resignation and Kant's innovation are tragic consequences of “hyper‐Augustinianism”—a competitive conception of divine and human agency, which leads to excessive suspicion of acquired virtue. This review argues that Putting On Virtue succeeds in its first aim but leaves its second intriguingly uncompleted. Despite this deficiency, however, this essay also argues that Putting On Virtue makes plausible Herdt's audacious suggestion that Augustinian and Emersonian perfectionism may be reconciled by bringing acquired and infused virtue under a single term.     

Discriminative performance of the domestic hen in a visual acuity task

The performance of 6 domestic hens on a visual acuity task was studied using a spatial discrete-trial conditional discrimination procedure. Gray stimuli and vertical square-wave gratings, ranging in spatial frequency from 1 to 10 cycles per millimeter, were presented in a descending and ascending series of probes. On each trial, either a grating or gray stimulus was presented. Only one spatial frequency of grating was presented during each session. Between probe sessions, training continued at the coarsest grating value. Stimulus discriminability, measured as values of log d, changed with changes in grating spatial frequency for both probe series. Fitted lines described the linear portion of the psychometric functions. Thresholds estimated from the lines generally ranged from four to six cycles per degree, with slightly greater estimates from data from the descending probe series. There were no systematic changes in response bias as a function of grating spatial frequency.     

Developmental profiles of adolescents and young adults choosing abortion: stage sequence, décalage, and implications for policy.

Three groups of unmarried females (ages 12-14, 17-19, and 23-25) electing to have an abortion in the first trimester of their first pregnancy were administered the Washington University Sentence Completion Test, the Rest Defining Issues Test, and a moral judgment interview of their reasons for choosing an abortion. Results indicated that there were clear developmental differences between the youngest group and the two older groups on the general measures of ego development and principled moral reasoning, as theory would have predicted. There were, however, no major differences across the three groups on the level of reasoning which directly assessed the specific decision concerning abortion. Further, all three groups were assessed at the self-protective level characterized by Stage 2 reasons of financial consequences and the need to rely exclusively on one's own self in such a difficult dilemma. These findings and developmental profiles are compared to national base rates, and the possible implications of apparent décalage, or discrepancy between the general stage assessments and the specific assessment on abortion, are discussed. In addition, the similarity between the older group of adolescents and the young adults was examined, particularly in light of the current controversy over mandatory parental consent.     

Gender and Hedging: From Sex Differences to Situated Practice

In a reanalysis of women's language, Holmes (1995) has argued that women's use of hedges expresses interpersonal warmth and not, as many researchers have maintained, linguistic tentativeness. It is typically men, she suggests, who employ hedges to convey imprecision and incertitude. In this study, we investigated the use of the hedges sort of and you know in a sample of South African students. Holmes's method of analysis was applied to hedging behavior in 52 dyadic conversations. The study consisted of a 2 (Speaker Gender: Male/Female) × 2 (Audience Gender: Male/Female) × 2 (Condition: Competitive/Noncompetitive) between-subjects experimental design. The results showed that contextual influences eclipsed the effects of gender; in fact, no main effects were found for speaker gender. Fewer hedges were deployed in the competitive condition than in the noncompetitive condition. Moreover, perhaps reflecting differences in social status, both sexes used sort of to express tentativeness more frequently when talking to male addressees. When speaking to female addressees, on the other hand, men deployed facilitative you know hedges more readily than women.     

The influence of shape on apparent area: a new demonstration.

It has long been recognised that the apparent area of a form is influenced by its shape, and it has generally been accepted that when a more compact and a more diverse form of the same physical area are compared, the more compact is judged smaller. Experiments are reported which demonstrate that when the apparent area of an isosceles triangle is bisected, the reverse of this principle holds. It is shown that when the apparent areas of a triangle and trapezium are being compared the relative location of the forms being judged determines the direction of the error typically found. Three theories of apparent area are discussed, and reasons for rejecting them put forward. It is concluded that no adequate theory has yet been proposed.